Unsupervised

You supervise me, sure. But do you talk to me? Barely. You have just enough time to give me the barest of instructions before you’re off to the next meeting. How to do it, or even if I can do it, is inconsequential, secondary.

I understand. I really do. You’re a busy man. I’m an intern. My sole purpose here is to help, and if I take you away from your work all the time, that’s not helping.

Still, though, it’s a waste of my time and yours if I sit here all day reading Divergent while I wait for our “talk.” I try, sometimes, to forge ahead and do projects with minimal guidance, only to have you finally clue in long enough to tell me I did it wrong. In two sentences, you tell me exactly how I should have done it. If I had known that before, that’s how I would have done it. Instead, I’m adrift in a mess of work where I can barely tell what I’m supposed to be doing at any given moment.

I feel guilty, like I’m a drain on your resources. When I sit here writing a frustrated rant instead of working, I feel terrible for wasting time. But what else am I supposed to do, organize paper clips?

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3 thoughts on “Unsupervised”

Hey, at least you’re trying.
I’ve been in that situation before. Even now, years later, I’ll tell my boss “I’m working on so-and-so, and doing it like this”. In a few sentences, he knows what I’m going to do and can say something if he has a problem with it.

Yeah, this was a situation where I didn’t really have enough background to say, “I’m doing this” — I had to wait till they told me what to do 😛 Overall, it was a good experience, but I definitely spent more time blogging than interning!